30 March 2015

I sleep through the Northern
Lights. Aurora Borealis flickers in my
dreams, but, unlike the tawny owl that hoots from the nearby signal box, my
eyes are shut.

Travelling North in Sutherland focuses the mind. The A836 from Lairg narrows, becoming single
track from Altnaharra to Tongue. The A897
is pretty much single track from Helmsdale to where it joins the Northern Highway
near Melvich.

As you proceed you become
aware that, despite the seeming emptiness around, you are being watched. Buzzards clock you from fence posts and
treetops. Deer peer at you from the
tundra-like wastes. Pairs of eyes – pine martens? Foxes? Maybe wildcat? - track you from the forests. Little brown birds flit about, as if they didn't
have a care in the world, but part of the avian internet, tweeting your
approach and passage..... I am reminded
of a "Mad" magazine cartoon of a man driving across a desert in the United States,
vultures slowly flapping behind as his Petrol gauge shows empty. A couple of frames later the driver is sitting
by the roadside while the vultures carve the car up with their knives and
forks.......

Travelling North means the sun is
behind you. It means you are approaching
dark. It means you are uphilling all the
time, as the psychology of maps determines your direction. And the sun, the
giver of life, comes and goes up here with awesome power: in winter, Apollo
hardly gets out of bed; in summer, he hardly sleeps; in Spring and Autumn he
comes and goes with cloudy brooding, sometimes slamming the door in a sudden
gust of anger. And then sometimes, just
when you think he’s deep in slumber, he will flare up in the darkest hours, and
gleam across the sky in greens and curtains of fire – especially when I am fast
asleep…..

And travelling North in Sutherland means that you are about to
fall off the edge. There is no
more. Lairg to Tongue. Helmsdale to Melvich. Lybster to Thurso. Ends of the line. Deer to seal.
Trout to eel. Otter to
otter. Peat to kelp. The ends are option less.

And on the way are straths (not
glens) and The Flow Country. Wet patches of land and not land. Blanket bog.
Ombrotrophic bog. Clumps of hare’s
tail cottongrass. Eriophorum vaginatum. Conifer plantations. Heath-clad hills and then sphagnum moss
living bog. Then river bed, then lochs,
then lochans, then blanket bog. Sphagna
everywhere.

The Flow Country got its name in the 1950s, when Nature Conservancy surveyors dubbed
it thus, using an old norse term for flat, deep, wet bog (and related to Scapa
Flow; ice floes [Old Norse flō-
layer: flōa – to flood]). Caithness is jealous of its Norse heritage, and some
here resent the Gallicisation of Scotland, preferring to be thought Vikings
rather than Celts – but, hey! We are all
immigrants of some kind; snowflakes on the ice cap…..

Just where the Inverness
to Thurso railway intersects the A897 is my destination for the next two
weeks. Apart from Forsinard station
there's little there. A handful of buildings, the immature Halladale river..... Though, quietly, this is the nerve centre of a complex of
interests which between them are seeking to re-establish one of the greatest
repositories of stored carbon in the world.

I may exaggerate. I am no scientist. But the
Caithness and Sutherland Flow Country (covering approximately 1,500 square
miles) represents about 5% of the world's blanket bog (10% of the UK’s
reserves); a natural resource that stores carbon – in this area alone about 400
million tonnes.

Without the bog, carbon
would be released into the atmosphere.....
This is where the Flow to the
Future Project is based, in conjunction with the RSPB. In addition The Peatlands Partnershiphas been in existence for a number of years and they endorsed the project, played an important part in getting it off the ground and continue to support it as a partner. The Peatlands Partnershipincludes Scottish Natural Heritage, Forestry Commission
(Scotland), Highland Council, RSPB Scotland, Plantlife International and The
Environmental Research Institute and it liaises with local community groups,
Highlands & Islands Enterprise, the Scottish Government’s Rural Payments
and Inspections Directorate and the North Sutherland Community Forest Trust.

Flow to the Future
is a is an ambitious
plan to protect and restore seven square miles of one of Europe’s largest
expanses of blanket bog in Caithness and
Sutherland. It will also develop a
visitor and education facility close to the RSPB’s Forsinard Flows nature reserve, allowing the public and
research students to see and monitor the improvements to the blanket bog that
will benefit from the restoration work. The bog repair aims to bring back the
sphagnum mosses that create the peat, in turn helping many rare plants and
animals such as sundew, butterwort, otters, hen harriers and golden plovers
which make this area their home. In 2014
the project was given full grant approval of more than
£4million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and additional funding from multiple
partnership sources will inject a total of £9.6million of investment into the
project, bringing many additional benefits to local businesses in the area.

This is all heady stuff, and
unfortunately my head is full of cold. Stepping
out into the bog, adrift on a sea of sphagna, I am stuffed with sweeping
landscapes and cloudy air. Deer sniff at
me and flee. I catch sneezing glimpses
of Hen Harriers hunting. I probe peat,
sometimes to a depth of almost seven metres (it “grows” at about a millimetre every
year, under suitable conditions).

Here the landscape was prepared
by the last ice age, then slowly the mosses began their cycle of life, and
death. For blanket bog development an
annual precipitation of 1000mm is required, but it also needs a minimum of 160
wet days (a ‘wet’ day is defined as 24 hrs with a minimum of 1mm precipitation)
and an annual mean temperature for the warmest months in the 9º - 15ºC range,
with relatively low seasonal fluctuation.

Because of the acidity that
builds up in the bog, the sphagnum mosses do not completely rot, but the
decaying matter accumulates to form an inactive substratum called catotelm peat, on which the active
surface peat (acrotelm) floats, or
flows….. One interesting fact I picked
up is that there are fewer solids in a peat bog than in the same volume of milk….

In this cool and wet climate, one
of the features of the Flow Country is the dubh
lochain, a maze of peat lochans, or little lakes. Some of these support fish, and also form
ideal habitats for wading and water birds, so in the breeding season you may
see golden plover, greenshank, black-throated divers and common scoter…..

It is not yet the breeding
season, and so I see none of the above, but flounder in the mire, and stumble
across the brash (broken remnants of felled forestry). In the 1980s, attracted by government
encouragement and tax breaks, landowners here ploughed the peat into giant
furrows, and planted non-native conifers. Now the project is to remove as much of these
as possible, as they have dried out and destroyed the peat, and their close
cover has provided protection for predators, such as foxes and pine martens,
and scared the nesting birds for at least several hundred metres from their
shade….

Even clearing a small area
involves major effort. It’s all very
well to imagine that the wood can be removed and sold, but that means machinery
and trucks and men and time. Then there’s
the brash – the stripped branches – which have no value. In some cases these are mulched, but in others
they are mashed down into the furrows by caterpillar diggers. And there are the roots…..

To encourage mosses to recolonise
the felled areas, pools have to be created, and streams need to be controlled. Without control much of the old peat and soil
from the felling sites would clog the rivers, damage fish stock, and eventually
end up in the sea. So the RSPB have been
putting in dams and silt traps - thousands of them.

This
work benefits the local economy by providing jobs and income for contractors.

As one of the biggest projects in the UK to combat
climate change the Flow to the Future
campaign is of great importance, and with the side effect of attracting thousands
of visitors to the area who need to eat and sleep and travel and who want to
learn, the project has to be beneficial on many fronts.

During my brief stay in this wild
expanse of ancient nature, the gods are agitated. We huddle together in awe as the sun
disappears, and the day darkens. Is it a
warning? It seems to me that Apollo is
frowning but, as the moon slides by to restore the
day, the message is clear – restore the environment! Undo the interference and celebrate the joys
of never-ending, gently undulating, far flowing, blanket bog!

I slept through the Northern Lights,
but perhaps the eclipse has opened my eyes? I will go with the flows…..

1 March 2015

In Song at the Year's Turning (1955) R. S. Thomas published his poem, A Welshman to Any Tourist.

We've nothing vast to offer you, no deserts

Except the waste of thought

Forming from mind erosion;

I would like to think he was exercising wry wit, though the priest poet was rarely funny.... What was he thinking when he wrote?

No canyons where the pterodactyl's wing

Casts a cold shadow.

Had he never walked in the foothills of Cadair Idris, where Buzzards flap their pterodactyl ancestry in your hair? He did at least allow that:

The hills are fine, of course,

Bearded with water to suggest age

And pocked with caverns,

One being Arthur's dormitory;

He and his knights are the bright ore

That seams our history,

But shame has kept them late in bed.

I don't know for sure that it is shame that keeps people abed here, or the weather, which can be watery, to say the least. Even the slate roofs seem to flow downhill...

But Dolgellau has its strengths. In the Parliament House we drink home made soup, served from the ironmongery counter, and next door demonstrates that fashion is always in in this part of the world, or at least it was in 1854..... Perhaps King Arthur may have siopped here....? He is rumoured to have passed this way.

In one of the pubs a cider drinker tells me that he can't read, which is why they took his sniper's licence away..... But I lose at pool notwithstanding, and cannot get the wifi to work.

So I take to the hills, where R S Thomas did know what he was talking about.....In Poetry for Supper (1958), he wrote, in The View from the Window,

Like a painting it is set before one,

But less brittle, ageless; these colours

Are renewed daily with variations

Of light and distance that no painter

Achieves or suggests. Then there is movement,

Change, as slowly the cloud bruises

Are healed by sunlight, or snow caps

A black mood; but gold at evening

To cheer the heart.

This view, above, is what you see from our friend's house, White Horses (Rhuddalt) at Bontddu, which, sadly, is currently up for sale. It's a view that R S Thomas would have waxed cynical about, or which his namesake Dylan would have found almost equal to his boathouse.....To draw back a little, and to climb the hill between Taicynhaeaf and Llanelltyd, along the New Precipice Walk, you get a view of the whole Afon Mawddach (River Mou thk), with Cadair Idris to the south and Barmouth Bay to the West (ish).

Of course, despite our best optimism, the sun does not shine all the time. But this scenery is breathtaking even when the sun goes in....

Walking here is breathtaking - in more than one way. I do not have the lights for heights, and I puff as soon as the incline is more than a thick pile carpet, so reaching three hundred metres above the fairly obvious sea level below me in little more than a mile is, well, breathtaking! Have another look at this view.

Worth it? I think so.....

And then in detail, the scenery is full of variety, from fern-bedecked deciduous trees....

And back to the shifting sands of the estuary, with a glimpse of Rhuddalt, where ship-building was once a major industry.....

I have respect for R S Thomas. His words ring true, if uncomfortable. Sometimes, for me, his preacherly tone is too much thought for the day, but his understanding of the Welsh world, and his voice, are for me grand drops in the rainstorm of literature. At a conference in Cambridge, in 1986, he appeared having just driven across from his Welsh home, in his seventies; he stood tall and austere - a rugged statue amongst the reedy literati.

As a poet, at his best, he had the ear, and the authority, of Yeats, though no one can approach the latter's scope. Thomas spoke with a ringing English, less plummy than Dylan, more tuneful than W B, but with the gest of a master....

As I ramble in these wild hills, stumbling across mole hills, tripping on rabbits, I rehearse snatches of Thomas's words: I hear the names of those who might have dwelt in what are now holiday homes - Dai Puw (He was no good); Job Davies (eighty-five winters old, and still alive/After the slow poison/And treachery of the seasons); Walter Llywarch (Born in Wales of approved parents,/Well goitred, round in the bum); Evans (Yes, many a time/I came down his bare flight/Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen/With its wood fire); and Iago Prytherch (his name, though, be it allowed,/Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,/Who pens a few sheep in a gap in the clouds.)

Somehow I hear a voice amongst these hills. Somehow I feel a tremor. It's not the fleeting hawks, the birds of prey that streak past or stoop so fast - the kites, sparrowhawks, buzzards and peregrines (could that have been a goshawk?). It's not the looping winds that chill the sandwich in your hand, or cool the tea before the steam has had a chance to rise. It's a heart beating in the air; a spirit that yet thrives.....